By GREG ANSLEY
In the days following the return of Alamdar and Montazar Bakhtiari to Woomera detention camp, police began a hunt for the people who helped them to escape and hide for almost a month.
They have their work cut out for them.
The young brothers' covert journey from the remote Outback of South Australia to the heart of Melbourne's central business district, where they made their dramatic bid for asylum in the British Consulate-General, confirmed the existence of an underground railroad for escaped asylum seekers.
They were housed, moved and fed well before being delivered to a Brigidine nun, Sister Brigid Arthur, who met the boys in Little Collins St and escorted them to the 17th floor Consulate-General.
Although the Brigidine Sisters oppose the detention of children and provide housing and other support for refugees legally at large through their Asylum Seekers Project, they denied in a press statement any earlierinvolvement in the boys' adventure.
But further evidence of the organisation behind their journey lay in the tip-offs that ensured a battery of TV cameras and journalists were on hand to record their arrival at the Consulate-General, and in the instant legal representation of Melbourne solicitor Eric Vadarlis.
Vadarlis, a corporate lawyer who arrived in Australia from Greece when he was 12, gained national prominence in his failed bid to force the Government to accept the Tampa asylum seekers.
He is now fighting a class action to bring asylum seekers held on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island to Australia.
Alamdar, 13, and Montazar, 12, gave still further indication of the underground organisation in a videotaped interview, in which they said refugee advocates had told them another 10 escapers were hidden in homes around Australia.
Finding them will be no easy task.
Opposition to the Government's policy of mandatory detention - especially of children - spans Australian society, from Howard's old mentor, former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, to lawyers, bishops and academics, community and welfare groups, unionists, students and hard-core political activists.
It is an unlikely but cohesive coalition, networked through an often overlapping maze of political, social, religious, community and industrial groups, organising and propagating the message through a blend of old-fashioned meetings, street work and the internet.
Politics, ideology and the other normal divisions have been set aside.
Although some, such as the Catholic Bishops Conference, argue for a larger, streamlined refugee intake, or for changes in the composition of Australia's migrant flow, activists do not dispute the need for planned immigration.
Mandatory detention is the glue of a campaign which sets aside the normal borders of politics and ideology for a cause couched in strikingly similar language.
The International Socialist Organisation: "People are fleeing persecution by some of the most brutal regimes in the world. But when they get here they are locked up in remote and inhospitable centres, surrounded by razor wire fences and with few facilities – rightly called concentration camps."
Malcolm Fraser: "Could anyone really believe that a few thousand Afghans, including large numbers of children, could be a threat to the integrity, the sovereignty of Australia? ...
"We need to look at current policies on the basis of Australian values,
because they offend every decent fibre of our being."
This is probably the broadest social coalition Australia has seen since opposition
to to the Vietnam War, for much of which Fraser was minister first of the Army,
then Defence.
In one small irony, buckets used to collect donations at a left-organised meeting in Melbourne addressed by Fraser dated back to the Vietnam protests.
The campaign has mobilised the hardened protest machinery that co-ordinated the S11 protests that besieged global corporate leaders at the World Economic Forum at Melbourne's Crown Casino, and which has since engineered the revival of May Day demonstrations.
At another level it reaches into homes of the privileged through groups such
as Australians Against Racism, founded by bridal and formal fashion designer
Mariana Hardwick and novelist Eva Sallis to mobilise the arts, media and legal
communities.
The group has sponsored, among other activities, a TV commercial and a pro-refugee
school essay competition, and the campaign has embraced the formidable engine
of boriginal activism.
Joy Murphy, of Victoria's Wurundjeri people: "Aboriginal people know what it is all about to be displaced people, not to have freedom, not to have democratic rights, to be treated different from other people, seeking protection, running from persecution."
At the front line is the Refugee Action Collective which describes itself as a broad coalition of unionists, socialists, community groups and refugee activists, and which has an extensive network around Australia, especially through unions and student organisations.
The collective regards Australia's present immigration and refugee policies as discriminatory and repressive, rooted in the "original act of conquest and dispossession of 1788 ... (and) a tool of social control of the Australian State". It has been prominent in demonstrations and protests, including mass breakouts from the Woomera detention centre, where it has been active in a protest camp and, police suspect, possibly in the disappearance of some missing escapees.
The collective employs tactics designed to keep up the pressure on "the enemy": "We will not shy away from confronting authorities directly where necessary, and we will consider employing acts of civil disobedience as part of our overall strategy."
In Melbourne the collective is led by a steering committee that includes Victorian Trades Hall Council vice-president and textile, clothing and footwear union secretary Michele O'Neil, Ethnic Community Council leader Michal Morris, socialist Judy McVey, activist film-maker Tahir Cambis, state Greens' secretary Chris Chaplin, National Union of Students national education officer Kate Davidson, and Australian Catholic University professor Judith Bessart.
In Sydney, much of the campaign centreing on Ali Bakhtiari has been directed by Ian Rintoul, a prominent member of the New South Wales collective.
Rintoul is also head of the Australian branch of the International Socialist Organisation, led protests against Pauline Hanson, and was a Socialist Alliance Senate candidate in last year's federal election.
The Alliance, which was heavily involved with the S11 siege and has organised protests for causes ranging from the federal budget to the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor, is a coalition of eight groups from the radical left.
And there are the odd ratbags - serial pest Peter Hore, for example, whose arrest at Woomera added to a career that has included disrupting the Sydney Olympics, a cricket Test between Australia and the West Indies, the World Cup soccer qualifier against Iran, and singer Michael Hutchence's funeral.
But the movement against mandatory detention is not a creature of the left.
It has strong support in mainstream politics - including the Greens and Democrats and powerful voices within both the Labor and Liberal parties – from influential academics, such high-profile lawyers as Julian Burnside QC, and welfare organisations and major churches.
The Wesley Mission, Australia's largest religious charity, wants mandatory detention ended; the Catholic Commission for Justice, Development and Peace has demanded a full judicial inquiry into conditions at the detention centre.
The federal Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission is at present conducting an inquiry into children in detention that has produced appalling accounts - denied by the Government - of mental and physical abuse, self-mutilation and neglect.
Human Rights Commissioner Dr Sev Ozdowski: "A detention centre is no home for a child. Action needs to be taken to ensure the removal of children from detention is of the highest priority."
Fraser's is not a voice to be ignored.
The arch-conservative loathed by the left for his part in the dismissal of the Whitlam Government survived political annihilation in 1983 to be reborn as a statesman, former or serving chairman or board member of organisations ranging from CARE International and the UN committee on African commodity problems to the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group and the International Crisis Group.
And there is a network of other, moderate, advocacy groups that are linked tightly into the movement against mandatory detention - for example, the Coalition for Justice for Refugees and Migrants, led by a former detainee, Maqsood Alkabir Alshams, who quit the Refugee Action Collective because of its radical tendencies, but continues to work with it.
Amnesty International has asked its supporters to do "whatever they can to take action to defend asylum seekers and defend the human rights of refugees".
The Refugee Council of Australia - whose small group of life members is led by Major-General Paul Cullen, CBE, DSO and Bar, past chairman of the Order of Australia - wants Government policies rethought and encourages the declaration of refugee welcome zones.
Prime Minister John Howard may still have the bulk of public support behind him, but the critical mass of his opponents is growing.